Ted Cruz remains combustibly in the news again this week — a high-profile speech to Republican faithful in early-primary South Carolina followed up with another tart public spat in the Senate, with Majority Harry Reid likening him to a schoolyard bully.

Four months into his time as the junior Republican senator from Texas, Cruz appears to operating on the principle that no amount of publicity is too much — especially for someone who’s suddenly tilting toward a run for president. His affect will get plenty more media attention starting Thursday, when the Judiciary Committee on which he sits opens debate on the immigration overhaul, probably lasting until Memorial Day. Cruz is going to work to slow or derail the bill at every turn.

All the while, the 42-year-old has been working diligently to cultivate his conservative base on social media, with what looks to be decent success. If he runs for the GOP nomination in 2016, he’ll potentially be doing so with the help of more Twitter followers than anyone else in the field.

Some enlightening detail about this has been assembled in recent days by the Houston Chronicle, the senator’s hometown paper. Its Texas on the Potomac blog made Cruz a test case of an effort to gauge the social media usage of all 38 members of the state’s congressional delegation.

Cruz is averaging 353 new followers every day and he sends out an average of 3.5 tweets daily — Wednesdays being his most prolific days. The favored conservative hashtags #defundobamacare or #2ndamendment are in more than half the posts @SenTedCruz has sent so far. He’s only tweeted 405 times from his Senate account, but those missives have collectively been retweeted almost 105,000 times. (The most recent, about the Benghazi embassy contretemps, went out at breakfast time and had been retweeted almost 4,000 times before noon.)

And get this: 86 percent of Twitter sentiment about the senator has been positive, by the Chronicle’s calculation.